Property in France: The kitchen is bare

C'est la folie: stripping out the kitchen reveals the soul of a home.

Which is the most important room in your house? For centuries, your proud Englishman might have named his dining room or his library. A well-to-do lady might have chosen her drawing room or parlour. But never the kitchen: no, not that smoky workhouse in the basement, peopled with shiny-faced serfs slaving over plum pudding and lark pie.

The living-kitchen was the domain of the poor, huddled around the hearth of the single room in which they lived and worked and cooked – as at La Folie before the war, according to Antoinette, a sweet lady who grew up here in the Thirties and who came back for a quiet weep over her memories a while ago.

How the world has turned. In England today, the kitchen table has become the hub around which life in many houses revolves. Indeed, a large kitchen at the heart of the house has become an article of middle-class rus-in-urbe aspiration, even for super-rich footballers' wives. It is less fortunate citizens (and New Yorkers) who are more likely to follow The Royle Family model of the telecentric household glued to their sofa in the lounge.

I mention all this, because kitchenlessness beckons at Ice Station La Folie and I am wondering how it will feel. Alice has decided that life with two young food-flingers and a husband incapable of cooking without finding a role for every pan in the house is untenable without the love and support of a dishwasher. And there is no space for a dishwasher without ripping out the existing carpentry, including a vast beam that may or may not be holding up the house.

I have already removed about 200 screws, some of them long enough to hold a cathedral together, when Serge the mason arrives to help me wreak destruction on Zumbach's brutish workbenches.

I grit my teeth as I feel the chainsaw chewing timber in my hands. No going back now. And then I wince again, for a different reason, as Serge starts thumping the 5in-thick concrete end-slabs of the submarine pens with his bare palms, like a penitent Tudor king. I thought those slabs would be difficult to shift with a sledgehammer. But the masonry soon begins to wobble: another thumbs-up for the wine-and-saucisson diet.

Finally, we attack the beam. "Cut it there," mutters Serge, scraping a line in the black patina coating the timber. We both know that it's best if I am the one found holding the chainsaw when they come to dig us out of the rubble.

Serge growls as the chainsaw emerges from the bottom of the cut. The good news is that the sky has not fallen upon our heads. The bad news is that Serge is still holding up the beam – and possibly the roof – with his bare bands.

"Now cut it on the other side, too," he hisses, "and we'll pull it out." I obey and La Folie does not crumble.

Serge scratches his head as we survey the rough husk of what was once a welcoming space. "Pas de cuisine," he shrugs. And from the way he walks slowly back to his car, I can see that, for a man used to building things, it must be troubling to swap creation for destruction.

I feel shaken, too; my relief tinged with guilt at what I have done. For it has all gone: timber, cupboards, plug sockets, everything. All we have left is a dust-filled ruin, which looks a bit like a disused Polish interrogation chamber.

It doesn't seem to matter that Yves-Pascal, the notaire, has leant us a nifty side-table with two electric rings for cooking in the winter sitting room, where Antoinette's mother once used to cook over the open fire. La Folie without a kitchen makes me think of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, its ancient walls exhaling the words "if I only had a heart" in a cloud of limestone dust.

At least Antoinette would recognise her old bedroom now, I tell myself, as I carry my paper plate up into the empty husk of the old kitchen, gaze out at the snowy landscape, and attempt to take comfort from the place I used to know.